The Successors' Ascetic Wisdom

The sections of the Kitab az-Zuhd devoted to the Successors — the generation that came after the Companions — represent a remarkable anthology of early Islamic spiritual wisdom. This generation, which flourished in the late first and early second centuries of the Islamic calendar, produced some of the most celebrated figures in the history of Islamic piety, and Imam Ahmad gathered their sayings and practices as an extension of the prophetic ascetic tradition.

Hasan al-Basri, who died in 110 AH, is represented more extensively than any other Successor in the Kitab az-Zuhd. His reflections on this world and the next, on the nature of hope and fear in the religious life, and on the qualities of the person who is truly detached from worldly attachment are among the most celebrated in all of Arabic spiritual literature. Imam Ahmad's preservation of so many of Hasan's sayings reflects their reputation as the most profound expression of early Islamic spirituality available from the Successor generation.

Malik ibn Dinar, Sufyan ath-Thawri, Ibrahim an-Nakhai, Said ibn al-Musayyib, and many other major figures of the first and second Islamic centuries appear in these sections with sayings and anecdotes that illuminate the practice of zuhd in the context of intensive scholarly and devotional activity. The picture that emerges is of a generation for whom serious engagement with Islamic law and hadith was entirely compatible with — indeed inseparable from — a life oriented toward God and away from excessive worldly concern.

The ascetic wisdom collected from the Successors often takes the form of short, aphoristic sayings rather than extended discourses. These sayings, polished to a high degree by the oral tradition in which they circulated, have the quality of spiritual proverbs that can be memorized and returned to repeatedly. For the student of Islamic spirituality, the Successor sections of the Kitab az-Zuhd provide a direct window into the earliest articulations of the Islamic spiritual ideal outside the prophetic text itself.